MARR-VEL­LOUS!

I re­cently went to see Johnny Marr per­form at the Cam­bridge Corn Ex­change. All I can say is, what an in­spi­ra­tional gui­tarist. I strongly ad­vise each and ev­ery reader to stop read­ing this and go and pur­chase a copy of The Smiths’ Hat­ful Of Hol­low (if they don’t al­ready own it!) to al­low them to hear for them­selves. I’m not ex­ag­ger­at­ing when I say that Johnny doesn’t even sound like a gui­tar - or any other in­stru­ment for that mat­ter! I don’t know where you’d be­gin writ­ing a Steal Their Style fea­ture on Marr! He just blends acous­tic and elec­tric parts sub­limely on his records and man­ages to pull off this in­no­va­tive sound live, too. Com­bine that with his ge­nius song­writ­ing and you have a vir­tu­oso mu­si­cian who, for me, will al­ways be up there with Hen­drix and Clap­ton. Now, I must be­gin to save for that lovely sig­na­ture Jaguar of his! Al­fie Wil­liams Johnny Marr is in­deed a spec­tac­u­larly cre­ative and able gui­tarist. While Mor­ris­sey’s mono­tone vo­cals never re­ally did it for me, I was al­ways struck by the clev­er­ness and com­plex­i­ties within The Smiths’ back­ing tracks (iron­i­cally, the gui­tarists that have worked with Mor­ris­sey since his Smiths days have of­ten trod a sim­i­lar mu­si­cal path to that of their il­lus­tri­ous for­bear). Other projects with which Marr has been in­volved have al­ways ex­uded an air of class, too – I loved his work with Kirsty MacColl, for in­stance. I’ve not seen Johnny live, but it would seem like it’s some­thing we should all do, so thanks for the heads up. I saw a Johnny Jag in Sounds Great in Chea­dle last week and it looked fab – I may even re­visit Hat­ful Of Hol­low too, now you’ve re­minded me! Any­one got any other great gui­tarists that we should be tak­ing more heed of?